Photos, finally!

Here are some photos of Cochon, and of Cochon Butcher, which just opened right next door.
Among them you'll find the walk-in cooler, a stack of muffaletta sandwiches, the wood burning oven, the still in which Cochon makes its homemade moonshine, and various permutations of pig. But I can't figure out how to create captions, so you'll have to guess which is which.

Cooking in the New Year

This past week, the cooks at Cochon pulled off an incredible juggling act, serving the regular winter menu to hundreds of diners on Monday, Tuesday and lunchtime on Wednesday while simultaneously preparing an entirely new menu for new year's eve dinner on Wednesday night. This feat, which in effect was like running two separate restaurants at once, created unprecedented levels of chaos in the kitchen. Everyone worked extra hours, the sous chefs barely slept, Steven may not have slept at all, and no one paused for a second of rest until a champagne toast at midnight on new year's morning.
Tuesday's frighteningly long prep list was written out on a slab of cardboard as tall as I am. To accomplish everything on the list, two of the daytime prep cooks worked a double shift, staying from 8 in the morning all the way through dinner service to work alongside me and Bill in the back of the kitchen. Some of the prep tasks were business as usual--slice onions, pick parsley, peel potatoes--and some were completely new. I was charged with preparing crabs for making bisque, a process that involved taking each crab, still alive but sleepy from being packed on ice, inserting a knife into its back side (amidst claw gestures of protest, some feistier than others) and then using a twisting motion to tear the crab's helmet from the rest of its body (if this seems morally ambiguous to you, this David Foster Wallace piece might help you sort through your opinions on the rights of crustaceans). Mass murder aside, this bisque was a real bitch to prepare; the boiled crabs returned to me several hours later in a massive pot, whereby I pureed the mixture, shells and all, with an industrial strength hand-held blender (a close cousin of the jack hammer), then strained it once, pureed it again in batches in the regular blender, and then strained it again through a fine chinoise. All of this just to create the base which, by the time it reached diners' plates on Wednesday night, was seasoned with ginger and cream, laced with lumps of crab meat and garnished with a tomato, crab and shallot salad.
The creative process of developing the new year's menu was the work of Steven and Steven alone. No one else in the kitchen, not even the sous chefs, seemed to have a clue what the menu was going to look like until the paper menus were emerging from the printer well into the afternoon on Wednesday. A mere hour before dinnertime, I watched Steven explain to Didier in pidgin Spanish (Steven is fluent in a Spanish-like dialect, born out of years of working in kitchens, that derives almost entirely from curse words and the present tense.) the soup and salad dishes that he was in charge of preparing that night. Witnessing this new year's meal come together in such a non-collaborative and last-minute way makes me suspicious of holiday menus in general. When I go to a great restaurant, I would prefer to eat the dishes that the cooks know how to prepare in their sleep rather than the creative new ones that they are test driving on your dinner plate (Lesson I've taken away from this: research beforehand or ask your server what a restaurant's signature dishes are, and order those).
During dinner service, Didier was relegated to a station on the back line so that Brittany, the pastry chef (who, for the record, had been working since 2am the morning before), and I could work the deep frier for the fried banana split, one of her three new year's concoctions. The menu, a $60 four-course prix fixe, included dessert, which meant that every single person in the dining room would be getting a postre (instead of the roughly half who order dessert on a normal evening). I spent the night in a whirlwind between the front and back lines, plating chocolate cakes and tarts in the back and then running up to the front line to help Brittany with banana splits--battered fried bananas with dulce de leche ice cream, chocolate fudge, candied peanuts, whipped cream and a homemade maraschino cherry--and then, in between dessert tickets, helping Didier plate salads, ladle and garnish soups, and run his plates up to the heated counter at the front of the kitchen.
Over the course of the evening I scored some significant snacks: a delicious grilled quail on top of a crustless grilled cheese sandwich; a juicy morsel of prime rib with fried onions and mashed potatoes; a slice of hog jowl (a Cajun version of guanciale that recalled memories of the spaghetti carbonara I was enjoying in Rome a year ago); a taste of crab bisque so darn velvety it must have been pureed and strained by a great talent, indeed; and a massive square of chocolate layer cake, I'm talking 3"x3"x5", which seemed the perfectly luxurious new year's eve dessert up until the point when I ate one and an offensively over-the-top tower of excess thereafter.
Overall, the night had an energy and excitement level far beyond average, and I enjoyed every minute of it. By far, though, the best part of the evening was that Steven and the other cooks were so preoccupied with the demands of the new menu that nobody had a single chance to yell at me!

New Year's Eve 2009

appetizer
(choice of one)
grilled quail with pimento cheese pain perdu
benne crusted redfish with grilled beets and ambrosia salad
sauteed goose liver with gingersnap gravy and turnip bread toast
beaten biscuits with wild mushrooms and chaurice

soup
(choice of one)
crab and ginger tomato bisque
turtle soup
bitter salad greens with strawberries, crispy hog jowls and meyer lemon cream
brussel sprouts with pickled cranberries and local goat cheese

entree
(choice of one)
oven roasted shrimp with black-eyed pea cakes & cauliflower
duck etoufee with dirty rice
prime rib of beef with buttermilk mashed potatoes (additional $10)
grilled tuna with potato & mushroom salad, caramalized pineapple & peanuts
barbequed goat with pickled cabbage and mirliton slaw
louisiana cochon with braised turnips and cabbage

dessert
(choice of one)
triple chocolate cake with caramalized kumquats
strawberry tartlets with ginger creole cream cheese mousse
fried banana split with dulce de leche ice cream

Your Average Night's Catastrophe

It's one in the morning and I'm fresh off of a typically stressful night and I now realize that my previous entry did not adequately convey the badness of the bad nights at work. I want to try to capture the magnitude of the badness by recounting the precise details of the night that just ended:
At 3:30pm, I arrive at work and set up my station and start off the night's prep work by slicing three trays of cheddar crackers. Then I'm told to peel shrimp, so I head to the walk-in cooler and there encounter the fifty pound tub that will torment me on and off for the duration of the evening. So I lug out the tub of shrimp on ice and put on gloves to protect my hands and begin peeling. But Steven is a little testy this evening and he decides to single out my shrimp-peeling abilities as the object of his frustrations. First he tells me to remove my gloves because they're slowing me down, and when I tell him the shrimp tear my fingers he tells me to toughen up. So I remove the gloves and continuing peeling, but I'm still slow and everyone in the kitchen seems painfully aware of my slowness, and Steven keeps pacing by and goading me forward by chanting "go, Rachel, go!" in a tone that is one part playful, two parts menacing. Ben and Didier both come back and give me shrimp peeling demos, and I try their techniques but my fingers are clumsy and slow and Steven tells me ominously that I WILL get all my work done tonight ("or else" implied) and by now the thought has crossed my mind that this tub of smug crustaceans could cost me my job.
And before I can even begin to make a dent, the dessert orders start coming in so I have to postpone the peeling and stash away the shrimp, but the back table is packed with pig parts that Bill is curing and I have to make do with one table for dessert plating and shrimp peeling, a dubious combination at best, but not one that can be avoided. So I haul the tub of shrimp down underneath the table and plate the dessert order and then haul the shrimp back up. But then, before I can peel more than three or four shrimp I find out that they burned two of the three trays of cheddar crackers that I sliced earlier and I have to slice more asap. So I pull out the logs of dough and bring out the slicing machine and start slicing crackers, but mid-way through I get more dessert tickets, and I'm balancing trays of crackers on top of the tub of shrimp, which is all on the dessert table, so I have a shrimp-cracker-dessert triple whammy on my hands and I stash away the shrimp and crackers, plate the desserts, then get back to the crackers just as a server comes back and says, whoops, she by accident told her table the wrong sherbet flavor and now instead of roasted banana sherbet they want Meyer lemon. so I tell this server sure, no problem, and curse her privately in my mind and make her two new sherbets, then I finish the crackers and haul the shrimp back up onto the table and I'm about to resume peeling when Joe informs me suddenly that he needs some of the peeled shrimp deveined and marinated and brought to him fast or he's going to run out. So I lose precious peeling time while I prepare him the marinated shrimp, and I'm about to get back to peeling when a double emergency presents itself--the line cooks need grated Grana Padano at the oven station, and more bean cakes at the saute station. So I frantically run to the cooler, find the bean cake mix and churn out a tray of bean cakes, but before I can get to the cheese Didier appears all sweaty and flustered and he needs more picked mint and parsley at the fry station. I can tell he's in a jam but I need to get the Grana grated, so I tell him lo siento but I can't do it right now and he puts Marvin, the dishwasher, on the job, so I go to grab mint and parsley for Marvin and they are high the fuck up there in the walk in and Marvin is no taller than I am so we reach and jump and grab until finally I get them and I shove them into Marvin's arms and then grab the Grana Padano and make a dash for the grating machine. I return to my station with the GP and the grater just as Joe comes back and tells me he urgently needs a six pan of grits, so I run to grab a six pan and head to the cooler. The grits are over in the far reaches of the room and I know that it will take me a while to maneuver the heavy pan out of its position, but luckily the pan is at the top of a stack and the grits are accessible with the pan in place, so I open the top and start grabbing handfuls. I'm awkwardly propped between buckets of gumbo and chicken stock on one side and racks of bacon on the other (the walk-in cooler is its own beast, and I could devote an entire entry to the mishaps that have befallen me in its chilly depths), and my open hand fits into the pan fine but when I make a fist around the grits my hand widens and I can't remove it as easily, so each time I squeeze out a handful I leave a smear of grits on the roof of the shelf, and meanwhile the bottom of my apron is dangling into a bucket of chicken stock. I run the grits to Joe and skid back over to the Grana Padano and it's hard as a rock, and I struggle for longer than I should cutting off a wedge, and then I begin shoving the chunks into the grating machine and it is shooting a spray of Grana in all directions and I'm using a cupped hand to re-direct the spray into the container and away from the pineapple and citrus salad and malt cream that are sitting close by. I finish with the cheese and haul the shrimp back up onto the table, and by now the ice in the tub has melted so the gallon buckets I'm using to hold peeled shrimp have set sail and are floating and careening through a murky gray lagoon. And just when I'm getting close to the bottom of the tub it's time to plate desserts for a party of eighteen, and I've been so tied up with bean cakes and crackers and shrimp and GP that I've forgotten to whip cream or slice lemons, so I rush to do those things just on time to fire the eighteen desserts, nine lemon buttermilk pies and nine apple cobblers.
By now it's ten thirty and I only have a gallon of shrimp left and I've switched out the tub for a smaller pan with fresh ice and things are looking up except that each time I peel a shrimp now there is an excruciating burning in my thumbs at the inner corner of the nail where the skin is raw from tearing open hundreds of spiny shells. So I deviate from the established peeling method and develop a new, less efficient system that relies more heavily on my index and middle fingers and excludes my throbbing thumbs as much as possible, and I get to the last shrimp and involuntarily yell out loud with joy that I'm done. There is still another hour and a half of clean-up work to do, including breaking down my dessert station, wrapping briskets, transferring ribs, packing up rice, and preparing stock pots, but all of this is a walk in the park now that the shrimp are tucked away in bags and the customers are gone and I've snuck back into the cooler to wipe away the grit marks that were the only remaining evidence of the past eight hours of mayhem.

Rite of Sausage

Things are heating up in the Cochon kitchen.
Fall and winter are the restaurant's peak seasons, and each weekend we brace ourselves to square off against an increasingly packed dining room. To prepare for busy nights of service, the guys who head the kitchen--Steven (owner), Bill and Ben (sous-chefs) and Charles (somewhere right below sous-chef)--work insanely hard, often arriving in the morning as early as 8am, staying until 2 in the morning and, in general, doing everything in their power to make sure the kitchen is prepared when dinnertime arrives at 5:30 each night. They'll work with strep throat, with fresh stitches in their hands, on very little sleep, non-stop and at full-speed for the entirety of their very long work days. If they work a sixteen hour shift, they most likely will not sit down once the entire time. Even more impressive than this physical stamina is their consistent ability to make things work no matter what type of unpredictable situations arise. If I mention to Bill that we're low on pear sauce then, before I've had a chance to process this discovery or ponder its consequences, he has peeled and diced several pears and set them on the stove with honey and butter to simmer. If every square inch of kitchen counter is occupied and a large party is in the dining room, then Bill will place salad plates up on shelves, balance them on top of pots, find room for them anywhere he can so that eighteen salads are plated and ready to go on time. If a party of eight comes in five minutes before closing and four of them are vegetarians, Charles will whip up a vegetarian special on the fly (most recently, a roasted half acorn squash stuffed with mushrooms and vegetable hash, served with creamy greens and garnished with fried threads of onion). If the restaurant is unexpectedly packed at 4pm between dish washing shifts, Steven will go back there and wash dishes himself. If I get nine dessert tickets in the course of five minutes, one of the guys will come flying back to my station and provide me with back-up support until the storm passes. The set of skills that this type of job promotes--the ability to think on your toes, to multitask, to work as a team, to plan ahead, to problem solve, to work under pressure--has made a deep impression on me as I watch these guys and learn from them each night.
The kitchen morale, to a certain extent, thrives upon the adrenaline rush of cooking for a packed restaurant. Bill, in particular, seems born for the heat of the kitchen and happiest when things are at their craziest. The man works with incredible speed; it took me a long time to even watch him break down a pig because I would blink and miss it, turn away for some quick task and then turn back to find that the 170lb animal, so recently intact, had been reduced to four legs in a bin and a head in a bucket of ice (Recently, though, I caught him in action: First off with the head, then cut each leg out at the hip socket, then slice away the skin along the back to be saved for crackling, then remove the loins from along the rib cage, then remove the ribs from the spine). When the restaurant is busy, Bill is like a broken record, reminding people with an amphetaminic grin how many reservations are on the books for tonight and how late he worked last night and how many covers we'll have done by the end of the weekend. Then, at the end of the night, he likes to do a recap of who sold the most food, as in "Joe, you sold 38 oyster roasts tonight!" or "I'm gonna have to make gumbo for the fourth time this week!" But even Bill has a limit to how much pressure he can groove on, and this past weekend was grueling enough that finally, mid-way through Saturday night's snafu, he threw his arms up and proclaimed "this isn't fun at all anymore."
In this pressure cooker environment, speed is key, and I'm afraid to say that, four weeks into the job, I am still operating at a relatively snaillike pace. In my own defense, though, I will add that this slowness is not for lack of effort; I am, in fact, working as fast as I can at all times, often in a state of near panic not unlike I Love Lucy in her classic conveyer belt debacle. On a typical night, I will have multiple prep tasks to accomplish in addition to my dessert plating responsibilities--slice five sheet trays of cornmeal crackers, peel a tub of shrimp (their spiny legs rendering the skin on the inside of my index finger the texture of shredded wheat, the upside of which is that I got to wear a latex, contraceptive-like device on my finger for protection), pick a gallon of parsley, rub fifteen racks of ribs, make a tray of beet cakes--and then, in addition, frenzied cooks will come back from the front line with emergency tasks for me--cut more alligator, slice more mushrooms, portion more cochon--and those have to be accomplished lickety split lest the cooks be caught empty-handed when new orders come in. When wringing moisture out of shredded beets goes awry and I spill the bleeding mixture all over the floor and the sink and my white apron; when I set ice cream containers out to thaw and forget about them until they are five minutes away from turning into soup; when suddenly it is 11 o'clock and I haven't yet begun my nightly wrestle to deliver eleven briskets and four pig legs to their braising pans; when dessert tickets come in so fast that Bill drops a ticket on my table and instead of saying the usual "postre" just says "weeds" i.e. you're about to be in them--at these moments I hang on for dear life, scrambling to remedy the situation before anyone discovers what a mess I'm in.
But between my slowness and mistakes and general rookie incompetence come small triumphs and, over time, I feel more and more like a bona fide member of the kitchen staff. On a recent night, Bill came back and told me I needed to make whipped cream for a lemon buttermilk pie dessert special, and I already had. One time, Steven told me my "latkes" looked good (and he actually called them latkes, which might in itself represent some sort of breakthrough). On Monday, I cut up a pan of lemons for Wes (a daytime line cook), and he actually said "Wow, that was fast" when I brought them to him. Hallelujah. But my most triumphant moment, my true arrival, came late last Thursday evening when Steven came back to my station to tell me I needed to make andouille sausage and then added, after a dramatic pause fit for an action movie (When I think about this comment now, I hear Bruce Willis' voice in lieu of Steven's): "Word on the front line is you grind a good sausage."
This rumor, as it turned out, was poorly founded, and fifteen minutes later I was standing in front of the enormous sausage cranker, praying no one would notice the cylinders of andouille snaking across the metal table, bursting open, falling on the floor, running away from me like a cartoon hose gone out of control.

Fall Menu

Cochon's oyster and bacon sandwich is an embodiment of everything that the restaurant does well. Of the trifecta mentioned in my first entry, this sandwich manages to squeeze the pork, the deep fry and the mayonnaise into one brilliant menu item. And, as I've also discussed previously, this sandwich (besides the tomatoes...) takes full advantage of Cochon's fresh, local and homemade ingredients. The sandwich starts with thinly sliced white sandwich bread which is buttered and toasted on the flat-top griddle. Then both slices are slathered with lemony tartar sauce, made with homemade mayo, homemade pickles and pickled lemon peel, capers, chili flakes, cayenne and (the secret ingredient) pickle juice. The sandwich is then layered with fried oysters--breaded and crunchy on the outside and still very soft and plump and almost raw in the middle--bacon slices, and lettuce and tomato. The sandwich is an ingenious hybrid of the classic blt and the New Orleans oyster po-boy, and it is a year-round staple on the Cochon menu.
Other parts of the menu undergo seasonal changes, and last week the restaurant transitioned to its fall menu. In New York, the arrival of fall ingredients on restaurant menus is an exciting and welcome change; the air gets cold and the leaves change color and it feels natural to move from berries and tomatoes and basil to apples and beets and butternut squash. In New Orleans, by contrast, the mildness of the seasons tempers the urgency of transitioning to heartier fare (temperatures here are still in the mid 70s, so it feels like even delicate summer vegetables could grow if they wanted to). Also, the summer menu at Cochon wasn't exactly light to begin with; the restaurant's signature dish, the Louisiana cochon, is a hockey puck of shredded pork that is pan fried and served with a lardon-studded cabbage and turnip mixture and garnished with crackling. So more exciting to me than the actual seasonal shift itself was witnessing the creative process of changing the menu. I, being a lowly prep cook, was almost entirely excluded from this process and, for example, was told to julienne an entire ham leg without being explained what for. But I did get to observe the action from afar, eavesdropping on conversations between Steven and the other head cooks, listening to them whisper about deviled crab or toasted pecans or mustard breadcrumbs, and watching Steven tweak new dishes until he deemed them menu-worthy. Once he plated a new salad dish and then swept the whole thing dramatically into the trash. Maybe he just wanted to see how it looked on the plate?
New additions to the fall menu include: a sweet potato and andouille pie baked in a cornmeal crust and served with an apple and mustard green slaw; shrimp and julienned ham (aha!) sauteed in lard, then finished with a satsuma juice reduction and chili butter and served on top of a corn meal and lima bean cake; a mixed green salad with roasted onions and toasted pecans; mac and cheese; a creamy broccoli and rice casserole; a deviled crab dip served with cheddar and thyme crackers; and braised pork cheeks served on top of a beet cake. Regarding the beet recipe, in a rare moment of creative input I declared myself a latke connoisseur and suggested that onions be added to the shredded beet mixture, and Steven and Bill seemed to genuinely consider the idea, though I haven't yet seen any changes be made.
I think my favorite kind of food tasting, though, is not the exciting new menu items or specials but the little morsels of food that present themselves at unexpected times throughout the work night: a pork rib fresh out of the smoker; a piece of beef jerky pulled directly off the rack of the food dehydrator and still slightly moist; a thin slice of a country ham that has just been cut open after two years of aging. These foods are like the meat equivalent of a fresh-picked strawberry or an apple directly off the branch and, no matter how melt-in-your-mouth the ribs on the menu (roasted off in the wood burning oven and served with pickled watermelon rinds), they can't beat the texture and taste and enjoyment of a fresh-smoked rib eaten standing up at your prep station during the beginning hours of a long night's work.

Raw Talent

Let me take a moment to comment on a genetic gift from my father's side. We Arons' are blessed (or, in certain situations, cursed) with highly acute senses of smell, I'm talking police dog olfactory systems, attuned to the barest sprinkling of aromatic particles in the atmosphere. The corollary is that I have one keen-ass set of taste buds and, as a result, have been detecting hidden flavors all over the Cochon kitchen: a savoriness in the apple pie crust (lard); a musty taste in the andouille sausage (file powder, made from sassafras leaves and used as a spice and thickening agent in gumbo); molasses in the fig sherbet (the fruit is cooked in Steen's cane syrup); a hint of blue cheese in the honey custard. This last flavor struck me as odd. I called Bill over to have a taste, but the moldy overtones were lost on his tongue. Suspecting that years of nicotine abuse may have compromised his sense of taste, I sought a third opinion and, sure enough, the creole cream cheese in the custard was spoiled. What a disappointment that my DNA codes for a talent so expert and yet so utterly unmarketable--that I may be doomed to stand in walk-in coolers sniffing honey chocolate cakes for spoilage while Michael Phelps' webbed feet and endless torso take him straight to the stars.